The Night Andropov Died

It was an evening like many others. The dedicated drunks Lyokha and Olezhek, two of my fellow security guards at the Krestovsky Island Amusement Sector of the Leningrad Central Park of Culture and Leisure, were sitting at the large, plywood-topped table in the main room of the Amusement Sector’s administration cabin, finishing the last of the three bottles of toxic ersatz port, purchased, with money I had given them earlier in the afternoon, at the nearest liquor store—the one on Bolshaya Zelenina Street, some ten bus stops away—in exchange for their agreeing to take my shift at some unspecified point in foreseeable future. The two could not look more dissimilar—Lyoukha, who was in his thirties, was flaxen haired, flat nosed, pale eyed, void of any hint of a muscle tone, while Olezhek, pushing sixty, presented to the world a cue-ball-bald, sharp-featured countenance—yet trumping all the superficial differences between them was the simple, hard fact that they both belonged to the timeless, ageless, million-strong army of eternal Russian alcoholics.

For the past couple of hours, they had been complaining bitterly to each other about their lives. They effectively had none—no families of their own, no money, no worldly possessions to speak of, just the acrid smell of their tiny rooms in decrepit, overcrowded, communal flats—and no realistic expectations of any kind for a better, more dignified future. While they talked, I was reclining, with my eyes half-closed, in a half-broken armchair by the window, beyond which, in the dark, in the meagre moonlight, covered in snow, loomed the hulking Diplodocus of the city’s only—and the country’s oldest—roller-coaster. It was enormous, ominous and comforting at the same time. In Russian, a roller-coaster is called “American hills.”

“You could always simply kill yourself,” Lyokha suggested to Olezhek in a solicitous tone. “As long as there’s death, there’s hope. That’s something always to look forward to. Don’t lose heart—there’s tunnel at the end of the light.” Pouring out into two chipped, cheap, faïence cups the remains of the swill in the bottle, Olezhek shook his head with a heavy sigh. “Too fucking late, Lyokha. Too late. I missed my opportunity to kill myself when the time was right, and now it’s too fucking late. Now I’ll just have to fucking wait until it fucking happens naturally, in due course of my growing decrepitude. There is nothing to be fucking done about it now… O.K., here’s to merciful death.” He raised his cup, with his pinkie held apart from the rest of his dirty, hirsute fingers delicately, high-society style.

“To death,” Lyokha echoed, and they clinked their cups and drank greedily.

“You two should go home,” I told them, yawning. “It’s late, and it’s been my shift for three hours now, and I just want to lock up and go to sleep.”

They turned their wistful, wet faces toward me. “Ah, traitor, traitor,” Olezhek said with feeling. That’s what he and several other fellow security guards there, at the Amusement Sector, called me, affectionately—“traitor to the motherland,” or, simply, “traitor”—in reference to my having applied, unsuccessfully, for an émigré exit visa from the Soviet Union two and a half years earlier, right after quitting my job as an electromagnetic engineer and shortly before, in a bid heighten my uselessness quotient, joining the shiftless pool of the shift security guards at the Amusement Sector. It was a time of bad people in power, and the worst time to be a Soviet citizen like me: a Jew, an underground writer. It was essential for me, and for people like me, to keep as low a profile as possible—and no one’s profile could possibly be lower than that of a nighttime security guard at the Central Park of Culture and Leisure, charged with the duty of keeping an eye on the roller-coaster.

“You, my dear traitor, you lucky bastard! You will yet see diamonds in the sky—and, maybe, in the end, manage indeed to get the hell out of here and go see Paris and Rio de Janeiro and… and New York and… oh, who the fuck knows what other wonderful places. And, even if not, if push comes to shove, you’re still young, and it’s not too late for you just to up and kill yourself, calmly and optimistically. You have your whole death still ahead of you, you bastard! How I fucking envy you, traitor!”

“That’s so true,” Lyokha piped in, mumbling, his head lolling on his chest.

“Out, Olezhek, Lyokha, out!” I told them. “I’m tired, and the American Hills and I need some privacy. We want to be left alone. Out, out. You can take the empties with you—that’ll be enough for a couple of beers, come morning. You’ll miss this bus. There won’t be another one until midnight.”

When, finally, laughing like mad children and cursing, tripping, and falling all over themselves on their way down the steep flight of stairs and out the front door, they had gone, I locked up after them and wandered aimlessly around the cabin space for a while, not quite certain what to do with myself. I didn’t feel like plowing my way, with an English-language dictionary, through the book of contemporary American short stories that had been left behind, a couple of weeks earlier, by some rare wayward foreign visitor to the underground literary club to which I belonged. Sometimes, during my night shifts, one or two of friends would come to the amusement park to keep me company, bearing bottles of wine, and we would while the night away drinking and talking about everything and nothing, about the humdrum lives we’d lived thus far and the imaginary ones that we hoped still lay ahead for us. This evening, however, the night air was downright frigid, and the hour was already too late for visitors.

I went back to the main room, and, with a spare key that I was not supposed to have, I unlocked the Amusement Sector administrator’s office. It was pitch dark in there, and the stale air smelled thickly of ersatz port. It didn’t take long to find what I was looking for in the desk’s cluttered bottom drawer: an old portable V.E.F.-Spidola, the compact yellow plastic box with black trimming and intensely green cat’s eye of a dial, the exact replica of one that I, and millions of other Soviet citizens, had at home.

Back in the main room, I turned the radio on. The air filled instantly with a forest’s worth of joyous sounds. Here, in this remote, wooded, scarcely populated part of Leningrad, you could actually get a few foreign stations on the radio. The routine, beast-like howling of the K.G.B. jamming frequencies—which suppressed the short-wave radio broadcasts in Russian by “enemy voices” in larger residential areas along the giant city’s irregularly shaped perimeter—was muted, depleted of energy, and disinterested in itself, as though unwilling to carry out its patriotic duties.

I had three “enemy voices” in Russian to choose from: the Voice of America, the BBC, and the German Wave. (Radio Liberty, deemed the most perniciously and openly anti-Soviet by the Soviet counterpropaganda officials, was unintelligible everywhere in Leningrad.) They were playing moody jazz on the German Wave. The BBC, disappointingly, offered an in-depth overview of the contemporary London art scene. The Voice of America, however, was a different matter. As soon as I tuned it up, I heard the anchorman saying, in a baritone too melodious and a Russian too correct to belong to someone living in the chaotic midst of it, “The official sources in Moscow are unofficially reporting the death of the General Secretary Yuri Andropov, after a long…” Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov: the refined, bespoke-suit-wearing, tennis-loving, single-malt-scotch-sipping, terrible-poetry-writing head of the K.G.B.; Brezhnev’s successor at the helm of power in the Soviet Union; “the butcher of Budapest,” who crushed the 1956 Hungarian uprising.

At that point, as though suddenly realizing that there were dramatic circumstances at hand, the local jamming installations swung into action, commencing to howl and ululate with a doubled fury. I gave the dial a few quick nudges and heard nothing but the same enraged howling everywhere, as though the world had suddenly been taken over by a giant pack of wounded wolves caught in a blizzard.

I went back into the administrator’s office and returned the Spidola to the desk drawer. In the dark, I lifted the receiver of the massive black beetle of a telephone and, bringing it to my ear, heard nothing but silence. The line, as usual at night, was dead. I was alone in this tiny world of mine, holed up in my cabin. As far as the rest of the world was concerned, I did not exist. And, anyway, there was no one with whom I could share and discuss the news of Andropov’s death—not any of my friends, who likely had gone to bed already; and not with my girlfriend, who lived clear across town, at least forty minutes and five rubles away by cab, and had no phone in her one-room apartment.

Restless, I returned to the main room, switched off the yellow, unshaded light there, and stood by the window for some time, with my forehead pressed against the frosty windowpane, contemplating the roller-coaster’s hulking, snow-covered mass, placidly mysterious in the pale moonlight. There was nothing for me to think or feel. Something was happening, something was going to happen, that much I knew. I couldn’t wait for the morning to come.

I winked at the roller-coaster, feeling a protective warmth toward it. “You stupid thing, you be well,” I said. It just sat there.

“Andropov est mort,” I said aloud—in French, for some reason. My voice sounded hoarse, wild in the night’s solitude.

If someone—some lost, ersatz-port-begotten ghost—materializing before me at that moment, had told me that, thirty years later, I would be writing about Andropov’s death in English, in America, on the week when post-Soviet Russia’s ruling class—made up, to a considerable extent, of the old K.G.B. cadre—would be celebrating the hundredth anniversary of his birth with a large exhibit dedicated to his life, at whose opening a glowing telegram from his spiritual successor, President Vladimir Putin, would be read—well, I would have known for certain that I had finally and irrevocably, once and for all, lost my mind.

I went along the hall and into the room where the security guards slept while on duty—which, of course, they were not supposed to do—on the long, narrow leatherette couch with uneven, cracked skin. Taking off my sweater, I rolled it into a semblance of a pillow, laid down on the couch with my head propped on it, and then picked up from the floor by the couch and covered myself with the stinking ancient communal goatskin that my Amusement Sector colleagues used as a makeshift blanket.

I thought that I would have difficulty falling asleep, given the state that I was in, but this was not the case. I was out like a light the instant I closed my eyes.

Mikhail Iossel, the founder and executive director of the Summer Literary Seminars International programs and a professor of English at Concordia University in Montreal, is the author of “Every Hunter Wants to Know,” a collection of stories.

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